As the developers of Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, Open Harvester Systems, and Open Monograph Press, the PKP team are experts in helping journal managers and conference organizers make the most of their online publishing projects. PKP Publishing Services offers support for:

As a customer of PKP Publishing Services, you will not only receive direct, personalized support from the PKP Development Team, but will be contributing to the ongoing development of the PKP applications. All funds raised by PKP Publishing Services go directly toward enhancing our free, open source software. For more information, please contact us.

I was wondering if one can submit a peer-reviewed research proposal to a granting agency through OJS or OCS, in a similar manner as submitting a paper for publication. If not, how easy will it be to add such feature?

That's a good question: would you be looking to customize OJS or OCS to be a workflow for vetting research proposals, or are you looking to incorporate proposals into a journal somehow? If you could provide us with a bit more detail on what you are looking for, we can respond more fully.

I am particularly looking for customizing OJS or OCS to be a workflow for vetting research proposals, e.g. to model the following scenario: "An author uses OJS to submit a research proposal to the funding agency. An alert is then sent to a number of referees for their evaluation. The authors would be able to check the status of their proposal and see the comments of referees. Once the proposal is accepted and the project is underway, the author would submit progress reports through OJS to the funding agency.

The funding agency in this case is the "Center for Academic Research" at my university who is considering using OJS for E-publishing as well as for managing the research funding process as roughly described above.

I think OJS would be good for what you are describing; however, you will most likely want to make some customizations, and you'd probably have to maintain two separate instances of the software if you were to also use OJS for e-Publishing as it is traditionally used.

Have you used the OJS software before? It supports multiple rounds of peer review, and allows for comments to be shared between reviewers, editors and authors. It is also built to provide blind peer reviews (so long as editors are careful to check that identifying information in any uploaded document has been stripped before being passed on). It includes a fair number of prepared emails (which can also be tweaked) which are sent by the system at various times, for example when an author finalizes a submission. It also includes the option to save all submission logs -- for emails and actions -- so that a 'paper trail' for each submission is kept.

Finally: we have had a number of people modify OJS to suit their own workflow purposes, which at times have nothing to do with journals. While we don't support these endeavours in the same way we support OJS and OCS, we are nonetheless very happy to see the software used in this way, and we'll be as helpful as time permits if you have any particular development questions.

If this seems like something your group may investigate further, I would recommend taking a look at the documentation found at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_download, especially OJS in an Hour, which details the entire system from an end user's perspective; the Technical Reference, which gives a detailed overview for developers; Customizing OJS, which will show you some of the very quick ways you can modify the appearance of the system; and Translating OJS and OCS, which will explain how to make locale (overall language) changes. At least initially, you can probably go far in modifying the system to meet your needs by making changes to the system's locale and template files.